One of the DomainTools products that our members depend on most is our Reverse Whois Lookup, which identifies domains owned by a specific company or individual. Longtime members will recall the original ‘Registrant Search’ launch in October of 2007, over five years ago. Today DomainTools announces a significant update to Reverse Whois, focused on the tool’s UI and UX.

There are two main elements to making a powerful research tool. 1. You have to have access to good data.
2. You have to overlay that data with an effective and user-friendly presentation layer. In the direction of #1, over the last five years DomainTools has heavily invested in our market-leading whois data set. In fact, over the last 12 months we have probably made greater progress in data collection and processing than ever before. Much of this happens behind the scenes to our users, however.

Over the last twelve months we have surveyed our Reverse Whois user base to uncover the product’s greatest weaknesses, to understand when our clients use a competitive product and why, and to sit with them as they walk our Product Managers through their use cases for both the old Reverse Whois tool and ongoing iterations of the new one. Our users wanted the ability to lower report prices, to more surgically target domain and domain-owner criteria in the result set, to filter out unnecessary domains, and to increase their confidence that the results would be valuable for them or for their clients. But it still had to be fast and the price had to be flat or down. We have attempted to accomplish the most important of these criteria with this new release, and welcome your feedback.

UX is especially difficult when you are dealing with complex data parameters and blind result sets, such as the case with Reverse Whois. Readers who also follow some of the more popular tech blogs will have noticed the increasing focus on design within the web/app communities. It will likely surprise no one to learn that we do not have a professional UX designer on staff (if you know of any in Seattle please email me), so we have done our level best to steal design ideas from more sophisticated sites. The presentation of the ‘AND’ , ‘OR’ and ‘NOT’ parameters within search is notoriously difficult and I am guessing some of you will recognize which site influenced how you see that presented in our new Reverse Whois tool.

On the topic of blind result sets, I would be remiss not to mention the very limited trial of our ‘interactive research mode’ for Reverse Whois. This is not discussed on the site, nor available through the site itself. In this mode users can actually view the domain result sets, and continue to iterate on their research. It allows for a type of step function for domain ownership and domain connection investigations. Due to the data access this mode allows, and the increased load on our systems, the trial interactive research view is being tested by a select few enterprise clients who have immediate needs for this level of access and can afford to pay the commensurate premium we need to charge to support it. Over time we hope to productize this mode and offer it more broadly. In the meantime serious inquiries can be sent to Susan Prosser, VP Partner and Industry Relations, via email: susan (at) domaintools (dot) com.

This Reverse Whois release is a beginning, not an end. We continue to add in more and better ccTLD data. Improved whois data parsing is on the horizon, which will allow for an even greater level of sorting and filtering. And at some point we hope to release the interactive research mode more broadly.

So go ahead and see what’s new with Reverse Whois and watch the overview video. Let us know your feedback on the enhancements. And don’t forget to notice that there is no premium price for historical domains!

Tim Chen has been the CEO of DomainTools since its 2009 spin-out into an independent company. Tim has over 15 years experience as a sales and operations executive in internet-driven businesses, including 8 in the domain name and DNS space. Prior to this Tim spent seven years in business development executive roles with Internet and software companies in the Bay Area, and four years in the Corporate Finance group at J.P. Morgan in New York. Originally from Rochester, New York, Tim is a graduate of Haverford College and Stanford business school. When not in the office you can usually find Tim on his bike, on his surfboard (or falling off it), or sequestered away reading entirely too much about the Buffalo Bills' draft prospects.

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In a press release today, we made an announcement about our partnerships with Mandiant, Cyber Squared Inc. and Malformity Labs to help provide security analysts with more powerful threat intelligence and cybercrime investigation solutions. Through these integrations, investigators who rely on our unparalleled repository of DNS and Whois data, will be able to more effectively […]

DomainTools is well-known for Whois data: whois lookup, whois history, and reverse whois reports. But we also have a lot of other cool products that savvy clients utilize all the time. Many of those products deal with domain names and DNS data, rather than strictly whois data.

Brand Monitor is a perfect example. This product reviews new domain name registrations for brands and trademarks chosen by our clients. Today we are excited to launch a significant expansion to that product, allowing our clients for the first time to monitor their brands across a much larger footprint of TLDs.

The first brand monitoring product we built many years ago only covered the biggest gTLDs with zone files: com, net, org, biz, info and us. Access to zone files allows us to definitively know that a new domain exists. So if Yahoo wants to monitor all the domains that get registered every day with the string ‘yahoo’ in it, they can do so in these TLDs. The counterpoint exists for TLDs (mostly ccTLDs) that do not publish zone files: for example if someone registered ‘yahoostinks.de’, the only groups that would know about that domain registration would be the registrant, the registrar, and DENIC.